Representatives of big browser makers Microsoft, Mozilla and Google talk about the future of browsers, as developers decry browser incompatibility and ask what browser makers plan to do about it. The panel of experts talked about HTML 5, Canvas, Silverlight, IE 8, Google Chrome and Firefox at the Web 2.0 Expo.

A comparison of the past two weeks of traffic on Tectonic.co.za - a period that covers the launch of Google’s Chrome browser - shows that in the week of September 1 to 8 Chrome jumped from 0 percent of browsers used to an above-average 2.98 percent, largely at the expense of Mozilla Firefox.

When Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and the codebase at the heart of Firefox were originally conceived, browsing was less complex. Now, however, functions that previously could be performed only on the desktop — email, spreadsheets, database management — are increasingly handled online.

The public trial of the Google browser will be available in 43 languages in 100 countries, Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management said at a news conference at the company’s Mountain View, California headquarters. Google Chrome relies on Apple’s WebKit software for rendering web pages, he said. It also has taken advantage of features of community-developed browser Firefox from Mozilla.

Even as Microsoft gears up to release Internet Explorer 8, the developers behind the Firefox Web browser are experimenting with a new technology that sharpens the threat their browser software poses to Microsoft’s most valuable businesses. The new technology, dubbed TraceMonkey, promises to speed up Firefox’s ability to deliver complex applications.

Mozilla plans to drag Internet Explorer into the next generation of open web technologies without Microsoft’s help. Programmer Vladimir Vukićević has developed a working prototype of a plugin, based on Firefox code, that makes newly developed HTML features available in to IE users. However, the plugin remains a work in progress, and development is still at a somewhat early stage.